UTOPIAN LITERATURE

Although utopian themes are present in premodern Japanese literature, a distinctive kind of UTOPIAN LITERATURE; emerged in Japan in the wake of the Meiji Restoration. As early as 1868, the Dutch utopian text Anno 2065: een Blik in de Toekomst (2065: A Glimpse of the Future) appeared in Japanese translation and helped spark a short-lived wave of miraiki (futurist) fiction that included over 100 stories written during the late 19th century. Western utopian (and dystopian) works, such as Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, the science fiction writings of Jules Verne, and even Thomas Moore’s Utopia itself (1882), combined with the optimism and promise of change that coincided with the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement and fueled a speculative reconsideration of social structures. Throughout the 20th century writers created imaginative utopias and dystopias, either to underscore the absurdity of life, as in the writings of Mishima Yukio and Abe Kobo, or to avoid censorship, as in the case of Akutagawa Ryunosuke’s dystopian novel Kappa (1927; tr. Kappa, 1947). More recently, Oe Kenzaburo’s Chiryoto (The Treatment Tower, 1991) and many of Murakami Haruki’s novels contain utopian or dystopian themes.